A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Tag: fiscal policy

Jonathan H. Adler is the Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation at Case Western Reserve University. In this new Cato Institute video, Adler explains how a recently finalized IRS rule implementing ObamaCare taxes employers without any statutory authority.

Today, National Review Online publishes our op-ed based on that study. An excerpt:

[U]nder the statute as written, if Congress fails to repeal IPAB in 2017, the secretary must implement IPAB’s edicts even if Congress votes to block them. Nancy Pelosi was right: We needed to pass ObamaCare to find out what was in it. We’re still finding out.

ObamaCare is so unconstitutional, it’s absurd. It delegates legislative powers that Congress cannot delegate. It creates a permanent super-legislature to supplement—and when conflicts arise, to supplant—Congress. It tries to amend the Constitution via statute rather than the amendment procedure of Article V.

ObamaCare proves economist Friedrich Hayek’s axiom that government direction of the economy threatens both democracy and freedom. After decades of failing to deliver high-quality, low-cost health care through Medicare, Congress struck upon the “solution” of creating a permanent super-legislature—or worse, an economic dictator—with the power to impose taxes and other laws that the people would reject.

Fortunately, one Congress cannot bind future Congresses by statute. If the Supreme Court fails to strike down ObamaCare, Congress should exercise its power to repeal IPAB—and the rest of ObamaCare with it.

Cohen is also the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Coons v. Geithner, which challenges the constitutionality of IPAB and which a federal court has put on hold pending the Supreme Court’s ruling in the individual-mandate and Medicaid-mandate cases.

When the unelected government officials on this board submit a legislative proposal to Congress, it automatically becomes law: PPACA requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to implement it. Blocking an IPAB “proposal” requires at a minimum that the House and the Senate and the president agree on a substitute. The Board’s edicts therefore can become law without congressional action, congressional approval, meaningful congressional oversight, or being subject to a presidential veto. Citizens will have no power to challenge IPAB’s edicts in court.

Worse, PPACA forbids Congress from repealing IPAB outside of a seven-month window in the year 2017, and even then requires a three-fifths majority in both chambers…

IPAB’s unelected members will have effectively unfettered power to impose taxes and ration care for all Americans, whether the government pays their medical bills or not. In some circumstances, just one political party or even one individual would have full command of IPAB’s lawmaking powers. IPAB truly is independent, but in the worst sense of the word. It wields power independent of Congress, independent of the president, independent of the judiciary, and independent of the will of the people.

The creation of IPAB is an admission that the federal government’s efforts to plan America’s health care sector have failed. It is proof of the axiom that government control of the economy threatens democracy.

Importantly, this study reveals a heretofore unreported feature that makes this super-legislature even more authoritarian and unconstitutional:

The Congressional Research Service and others have reported that even if Congress fails to repeal this super-legislature in 2017, Congress will still be able to use the weak tools that ObamaCare allows for restraining IPAB. Unfortunately, that interpretation rests on a misreading of a crucial part of the law. These experts thought they saw the word “or” where the statute actually says “and.”

How much difference can one little conjunction make?

Under the statute as written, if Congress fails to repeal IPAB in 2017, then as of 2020 Congress will have absolutely zero ability to block or amend the laws that IPAB writes, and zero power to affect the Secretary’s implementation of those laws. IPAB will become a permanent super-legislature, with the Secretary as its executive. And if the president fails to appoint any IPAB members, the Secretary will unilaterally wield all of IPAB’s legislative and executive powers, including the power to appropriate funds for her own department. It’s completely nutty, yet completely consistent with the desire of ObamaCare’s authors to protect IPAB from congressional interference.

It’s also completely consistent with Friedrich Hayek’s prediction that government planning of the economy paves the way for authoritarianism.

Well today, the Wall Street Journalreprints a series of emails showing how his administration colluded with drug-company lobbyists to pass ObamaCare. Never mind the nonsense about Big Pharma making an $80 billion “contribution” to pass the law. An accompanying Wall Street Journal editorial explains that Big Pharma “understood that a new entitlement could be a windfall as taxpayers bought more of their products.”

The money quote from these emails comes from Pfizer lobbyist/Republican/former George W. Bush appointee Anthony Principi. Even though the drug companies were donating to all the right politicians and pledging to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on pro-ObamaCare advertising campaigns and grassroots lobbying, President Obama still accused unnamed ”special interests” of trying to stop ObamaCare in order to preserve “a system that worked for the insurance and the drug companies.” Principi was indignant:

We’re trying to kill it? I guess we didn’t give enough in contributions and media ads supporting hcr. Perhaps no amount would suffice.

The nerve. I smell a campaign slogan. “Barack Obama: a Politician Who Cannot Stay Bought.”

The Journal adds:

[Former Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry] Waxman [D-CA] recently put out a rebuttal memo dismissing these email revelations as routine, “exactly what Presidents have always done to enact major legislation.” Which is precisely the point—the normality is the scandal.

And which critics have argued from the beginning. As I wrote more than two years ago, ObamaCare is corruption:

ObamaCare would guarantee that crucial decisions affecting your medical care would be made by the same people, through the same process that created the Cornhusker Kickback, for as far as the eye can see.

When ObamaCare supporters, like Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman, claim that “voters are rejecting the process more than the substance” of the legislation, they’re missing the point.

When government grows, corruption grows. When voters reject these corrupt side deals, they are rejecting the substance of ObamaCare.

Fortunately, voters so detest ObamaCare that there’s a real chance to wipe it from the books. This video explains how state officials can strike a blow against ObamaCare/corruption:

“It is time for governments to borrow more money,” according to former treasury secretary Larry Summers. He is not peddling this advice to Greece and Spain, but to countries like the United States and Japan that can still sell long-term bonds at very low interest rates. Summers urges the United States, in particular, to borrow more for “public investment projects” that are presumed to raise the economy’s future output. He offers the hypothetical example of “a $1 project that yielded even a permanent 4 cents a year in real terms increment to GDP by expanding the economy’s capacity or its ability to innovate.”

Even if such promising projects were easy to find, however, that is not the way the current government has been inclined to spend borrowed money. Despite all the rhetoric about “shovel-ready projects,” about 95 percent of the 2009 stimulus bill consisted of government consumption (salaries), refundable tax credits, and transfer payments which, as Robert Barro notes, “dilute incentives to work.”

Summers says, “Any rational chief financial officer in the private sector would see this as a moment to extend debt maturities and lock in low rates — the opposite of what central banks are doing.” Locking-in low borrowing costs would indeed make sense if the money from selling long bonds were used to retire short-term Treasury bills, but that would not involve borrowing more as Summers proposes.

For both government and households, it is certainly more prudent to use borrowed money to finance investments that will yield a stream of income in the future—either actual income (such as toll roads) or implicit income (the benefits from living in a mortgaged home).

Apostles of the Keynesian doctrine, such as Larry Summers, Paul Krugman, and Alan Blinder, invariably use hypothetical public works examples to make the case for more and more national (taxpayer) debt. Keynesian forecasting models, used by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to warn of the looming fiscal cliff and defend the fiscal stimulus of 2009, likewise assume the highest “multiplier” effect from tangible government investments.

In the real world of politics, however, Congress and the White House use borrowed money to placate constituencies with the most political clout. Federal spending on investment projects has essentially nothing to do with the huge 2009-2012 budget deficits (only 29 percent of which can be blamed on the legacy of recession, according to the CBO).

The Table shows that transfer payments and subsidies account for 63.8 percent of estimated spending in 2012, while federal purchases account for 28.4 percent. Also, most federal aid to states is for transfer payments like Medicaid. Within federal purchases, only 7.6 percent of the spending ($152.5 billion) was counted as gross investment in the first quarter GDP report, and two thirds of that was military equipment and buildings. Net investment, minus depreciation, is smaller still.

If borrowing more for investment was a genuine political priority, rather than an academic conjecture, the government could do that by borrowing less for government payrolls, transfer payments, and subsidies. At best, Larry Summers has made an argument for spending borrowed money much differently, not for borrowing more.

Sir, “Imminent ‘ObamaCare’ ruling poses challenge for Republicans” [$] (May 25) doesn’t quite capture my views when it reports that I believe “resurrecting protections for patients with pre-existing conditions would be wrong.” ObamaCare is wrong precisely because those provisions will not protect patients with pre-existing conditions.

Those “protections” are nothing more than government price controls that force carriers to sell insurance to the sick at a premium far below the cost of the claims they incur. As a result, whichever carrier attracts the most sick patients goes out of business. The ensuing race to the bottom will even harm sick Americans who currently have secure coverage.

The debate over ObamaCare is not between people who care and people who don’t care. It is between people who know how to help the sick, and those who don’t.

Consider these charts from the latest Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll, released today.

Even when pollsters tell the public that ObamaCare is “reform,” the public still doesn’t like it.

ObamaCare’s slip in this month’s poll is the result of a simultaneous drop in support among both Democrats and Independents.

The people who hate ObamaCare are really, really angry. And they are not going away.

The following shares of voters believe ObamaCare will either be of no use or will be harmful to the following groups: children (47 percent), young adults (51 percent), women (50 percent), the country as a whole (55 percent), themselves and their families (68 percent).

Bear in mind, ObamaCare has always fared better in the Kaiser tracking poll than other polls.